Empowering Catering Sales Managers with Pricing Authority

In the hotel business, catering sales managers often encounter potential clients who expect to negotiate for items such as room rental fees, audiovisual charges, and bartending fees. This article addresses both the advantages and disadvantages of empowering sales managers with the authority to reduce or waive these charges. Thus, hoteliers are advised to extend a structured yield management mindset into the hotel’s function-space area

Linguistic based matching of local ontologies

This paper describes an automatic algorithm of meaning negotiation that enables semantic interoperability between local overlapping and heterogeneous ontologies. Rather than reconciling differences between heterogeneous ontologies, this algorithm searches for mappings between concepts of different ontologies. The algorithm is composed of three main steps: (i) computing the linguistic meaning of the label occurring in the ontologies via natural language processing, (ii) contextualization of such a linguistic meaning by considering the context, i.e. the ontologies, where a label occurs; (iii) comparing contextualized linguistic meaning of two ontologies in in order to find a possible matching between them

QAKiS @ QALD-2

International audienceWe present QAKiS, a system for Question Answering over linked data (in particular, DBpedia). The problem of question interpretation is addressed as the automatic identification of the set of relevant relations between entities in the natural language input question, matched against a repository of automatically collected relational patterns (i.e. the WikiFramework repository). Such patterns represent possible lexical-izations of ontological relations, and are associated to a SPARQL query derived from the linked data relational patterns. Wikipedia is used as the source of free text for the automatic extraction of the relational patterns, and DBpedia as the linked data resource to provide relational patterns and to be queried using a natural language interface

A backward glance of who and what marketing scholars have been researching 1977-2002

Despite the diversity of all those involved within the marketing discipline, all have a stake in maximizing the advancement of marketing knowledge. Without a specific analysis it is difficult to reflect on where a field has been or where it might be heading. The purpose of this chapter is to examine who and what marketing scholars have been researching over the period 1977&ndash;2002 using content analysis. This chapter provides longitudinal benchmarking of the &lsquo;&lsquo;inputs&rsquo;&rsquo; (authors and institutions) and &lsquo;&lsquo;outputs&rsquo;&rsquo; (articles) examining the marketing literature in the four major marketing journals: the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.<br /

Sobre los efectos de combinar Análisis Semántico Latente con otras técnicas de procesamiento de lenguaje natural para la evaluación de preguntas abiertas

Este artículo presenta la combinación de Análisis Semántico Latente (LSA) con otras técnicas de procesamiento del lenguaje natural (lematización, eliminación de palabras funcionales y desambiguación de sentidos) para mejorar la evaluación automática de respuestas en texto libre. El sistema de evaluación de respuestas en texto libre llamado Atenea (Alfonseca & Pérez, 2004) ha servido de marco experimental para probar el esquema combinacional. Atenea es un sistema capaz de realizar preguntas, escogidas aleatoriamente o bien conforme al perfil del estudiante, y asignarles una calificación numérica. Los resultados de los experimentos demuestran que para todos los conjuntos de datos en los que las técnicas de PLN se han combinado con LSA la correlación de Pearson entre las notas dadas por Atenea y las notas dadas por los profesores para el mismo conjunto de preguntas mejora. La causa puede encontrarse en la complementariedad entre LSA, que trabaja a un nivel semántico superficial, y el resto de las técnicas NLP usadas en Atenea, que están más centradas en los niveles léxico y sintáctico.This article presents the combination of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) with other natural language processing techniques (stemming, removal of closed-class words and word sense disambiguation) to improve the automatic assessment of students' free-text answers. The combinational schema has been tested in the experimental framework provided by the free-text Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) system called Atenea (Alfonseca & Pérez, 2004). This system is able to ask randomly or according to the students' profile an open-ended question to the student and then, assign a score to it. The results prove that for all datasets, when the NLP techniques are combined with LSA, the Pearson correlation between the scores given by Atenea and the scores given by the teachers for the same dataset of questions improves. We believe that this is due to the complementarity between LSA, which works more at a shallow semantic level, and the rest of the NLP techniques used in Atenea, which are more focused on the lexical and syntactical levels

Automatic assessment of students’ free-text answers underpinned by the combination of a BLEU-inspired algorithm and latent semantic analysis

This is an electronic version of the paper presented at the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, FLAIRS 2005In previous work we have proved that the BLEU algorithm (Papineni et al. 2001), originally devised for evaluating Machine Translation systems, can be applied to assessing short essays written by students. In this paper we present a comparative evaluation between this BLEU-inspired algorithm and a system based on Latent Semantic Analysis. In addition we propose an effective combination schema for them. Despite the simplicity of these shallow NLP methods, they achieve state-of-theart correlations to the teachers’ scores while keeping the language-independence and without requiring any domain specific knowledge.This work has been sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, project number TIN2004-03140

An Empirical Examination of the Moderators of the Service Recovery Paradox

Some researchers (Abrams and Paese, 1993; Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault, 1990; Etzel and Silverman. 1981; Feinberg et al., 1990; Folkes and Kotsos, 1986; Gilly and Gelb, 1982; Hart, Heskett, and Sasser, 1990; Hocutt, Chakraborty, and Mowen, 1997; Kelley and Davis, 1994; Kelley, Hoffman and Davis, 1993; McCollough and Bharadwaj, 1992; Michel, 2001; Chrage, 2001; Smith and Bolton, 1998; Spreng, Harrell, and Mackoy, 1995; Tax, Brown, and Chandrashekaran, 1998) support the notion of a ‘recovery paradox’ which states that the occurrence of a failure may, if the recovery is effective, offer an opportunity to acquire higher satisfaction ratings from customers than if the failure had never happened. While a number of researchers have provided evidence in support of the recovery paradox, several recent studies (Andreassen, 2001; Maxham, 2001; Maxham and Netemeyer, 2002; McCollough et al. 2000) have failed to find such support. This dissertation theoretically and empirically examines factors which moderate the occurrence of a ‘recovery paradox’ in the event of a service failure. The research findings indicate that, under appropriate conditions, a customer can experience a paradoxical satisfaction increase after a service failure. One such condition entails the severity of the failure. That is, results indicate that it is unlikely that a first-rate redress initiative can return the satisfaction of a severe failure recipient to par. The findings of this investigation also reveal that a customer who has experienced a prior failure with the firm is less likely to be impressed by a superb recovery than a customer who has never encountered a problem with the service provider. In addition, customers are more forgiving of failures that occur during a process than mistakes that occur as part of the outcome. Furthermore, both control and stability intervene to affect the likelihood of increases in post-failure customer satisfaction. That is, people are more forgiving if they feel that the failure was not reasonably foreseeable to the service provider. Likewise, customers are more apt to exonerate the firm if they assess that the failure is unlikely to happen again. Lastly, this research found that control and relationship type interact to influence the probability of a recovery paradox. Specifically, customers in a true relationship are more likely to accept a low control explanation of the failure than customers in a pseudo-relationship with the firm

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems